A minor academic blast from the past

Every now and again, I am reminded of how small the world of medieval studies actually is. Recently, however, I was reminded of this by an encounter with my past self, a version from the spring of 2019. For the past few weeks, I have been putting together a draft of an article which seeks to put together a lot of sources spanning about seven centuries, as well as looking at the roots of these sources. Consequently, I have probably driven the university librarians slightly insane with my incessant interlibrary loan requests over the summer. Now that I am back in Oslo, I have to reap what I have sowed, and my office contains more books than ever before. One of these books is a collection of articles edited by Kai Brodersen, simply titled Solinus. New Studies, concerning the fourth-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Solinus, whose work known as Collectanea Rerum Mirabilium was one of the most influential sources by which Graeco-Roman ideas entered into the Latin Medieval learned world.    

The collection is one of relatively few such academic books that I have read in their entirety. Most often, I will read one or two articles while trying to build an argument for an article of my own, or assembling the syllabus for a class. However, as I always do prefer to read books in their entirety, I started adding post-it notes to the table of contents, in order to tick off which of the articles I had already read, so that I could make sure that I had finished the entire book. It was this practice that proved to me that not only had I read this book before, I had also read this specific copy of it before, loaned as it was by the University Library of Southern Denmark.  

This encounter with my past self is a good reminder that one's interests and academic pursuits do not follow a straight line. More often than not, we circle back to some previous point of departure, sometimes with renewed interest, sometimes out of curiosity, and sometimes because we forget that we have covered this material already. To my mind, this is a very positive aspect of scholarly pursuits, because it means that we never know what will serve us well at a future junction, so no matter what we read or write in any given year should be considered frivolous or wasted, just because it is not continued for some time, or because it does not appear in its originally intended form. For some people, these reappearances might be frustrating, since they might easily give the impression that one's work is not going anywhere. I for my part, however, think of it as a very good thing, because being able to return to something with knowledge and experience you did not have at the time when you were first dealing with something, can only make your current work on the material better and better founded.